Opera Announces Switch to WebKit Rendering Engine

Today Opera announced that they had now reached 300 million monthly users, combining phones, tablets, TVs and computers into the mix. The even bigger announcement though is that they are abandoning Presto and are migrating over to the WebKit HTML/CSS rendering engine for its smarpthones, iOS and PC efforts.

WebKit started in 2001 when an Apple engineer began porting KHTML over from Linux to OS X. Being that KHMTL was open-source, WebKit would follow in the same steps. WebKit continues to grow in popularity as major browsers like Safari and Chrome are both based on it.

Opera hopes to further expand and make WebKit even better, and has decided that they would rather leave behind their own rendering engine and instead work with the open-source community. Opera has actually been playing around with WebKit for a while now, but the company now feels the time is right to fully make the move.

Before modern browsers like Chrome showed up, I personally used Opera, so I’m very interested in seeing where this latest development takes the company. Can Opera offer something unique enough to the WebKit experience to make them a competitive alternative to Safari, Chrome and the many other WebKit browsers?

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